Guest post: If you’re cheering on a government shutdown

I see a lot of people cheering on a government shutdown. You need to consider what this means. It’s not just parks closing. During a shutdown, the National Science Foundation stops payments, which can rapidly result in research coming to a halt. For time-sensitive studies, this can mean the loss of data collection that can destroy a study completely. Research projects that have been funded to the tune of millions or even billions of dollars, which have been ongoing for years, can come to an abrupt end without results. That can cripple careers.

Also, remember that we are in the middle of one of the worst and most dangerous flu outbreaks in recent years. Guess who else gets shuttered during a shutdown? The CDC. Guess what the CDC runs? An influenza mitigation program. Oh, there’s also the drug assistance that it provides to people with AIDS, who will just have to go without. Think about what “going without” life saving medication does to people.

There’s also the NIH. Research on life-saving medical techniques will stop. “It’s just a few days”, you might say. Dunno about you, but if my remaining lifespan were measured in days, that might seem like a pretty arrogant and callous sentiment.

You know who DOES keep getting funded? The spies. The spooks. The people with their fingers on the nuclear buttons.

6 Responses to “Guest post: If you’re cheering on a government shutdown”

Hear, hear. I think most people don’t understand how government grants work. From what I can tell, there is an assumption that if you get a grant for X dollars, the NIH gives you that as a lump sum and away you go.

At NIH, on the intramural side, that’s where the real pain hits. The NIH Clinical Center does some absolutely ground-breaking clinical trials and other clinical research and although they can keep trials running, they are closed to new participants. There are a lot of people, and a lot of them are children, who are recruited to these trials every week and I know for certain that there were patients turned away from trials in 2013 shutdown who were harmed by this.

I was working at the NIH during the last shutdown. It was terrible, just really demoralizing. People kept saying to me how “lucky” I was to get all this free time off. But it wasn’t free at all. All of the work I had to do just kept piling up because I wasn’t allowed to do it and even if I had been allowed to work at home, that’s not much help when the servers are down and it’s illegal to access any government resources, even check your email. We were told we could go to jail for so much as turning on a government laptop. I worked there for two more years but I never felt the same about it after that.

After the government reopened, I was having a conversation with the owner of a local convenience store about my plans for the weekend. I made a comment about working that weekend to try and make a dent in my backlog of work. Some jackass behind me made a snarky comment about lazy government workers and how he had no sympathy and that was the moment I realized the Republicans were never going to pay electorally for the mess they had made. They’d already convinced the American public, through a long, ongoing campaign of denigrating civil servants and other government workers, that we basically deserved a bit of pain in return for our cushy, gold-plated pensions and amazing health insurance.

And that’s why American society is broken. Because the response to recognizing the disparity between government employee benefits and private sector benefits should be to demand better conditions from the private sector, not punish people for being lucky enough or possessing the needed skills to land a government job.

People who maintain infrastructure for national security are not necessarily bad people and nor are all the purposes for maintaining said structure.

A shutdown would be shameful, a waste, and yet another illustration of the harmful effects of libertarian (far right) cowardice. I do not read the news, but I’ve not heard of anyone cheering on a government shutdown.

The problem is that too few people realize what they get from the government. Perhaps if the government shutdown stopped farm subsidy payments, and people had to pay, even for a couple of days, what the food really cost, they would begin to understand. (I would only advocate such a thing if the truly poor were given free food, which, of course, would never happen).

The government, whether federal, state, or local, touches our lives nearly every minute. I am right now sitting in a house that is nice and warm in the middle of January because the local governments run a very efficient, effective power system. Our town does not smell bad because government cleans up our sewer water (though we do smell bad at times, which people blame on the wastewater treatment plant, but is almost always when the wind blows toward us from the corporate hog farms and cattle feed lots – which is much of the summer). I drive every day on roads that have been built and maintained by the government, and am kept safe by the government imposed speed limits imposed by a force of government employees (who unfortunately do have a disgraceful habit of shooting unarmed non-white people, though not in our town yet). A fire department maintained by the government is on the job and prepared to go into action the moment my house or my office should catch fire. When we had bats in our house, it was a government employee who got them out. When my son went to school, it was a government employee who taught him. When I went to school, the government employees taught me…and the government, in both cases, paid the lion’s share of the expense (though now it is more like the kitty cat’s share, with all the budget hawks cutting everything).

I could go on and on and on…imagine our life if all the levels of government were to shut down simultaneously and not reopen. The problem is, the Republicans know that, and they know that the Democrats know that, so they can use the threat of withholding important government funding from things that really help people, and hold the Dems hostage…or at least, those Dems that actually care about the ordinary people they have taken an oath to serve.

They’re all on facebook, Kevin @2. Every other post in my news feed is another of my so-called “liberal” friends cackling savagely about shutting down the government and how great they think it is to rub Trump’s nose in it.

Here’s an idea. Any government that fails to pass the budget should get fired: the entire Congress, as well as the president and the VP. And forbidden from running for any office at any level for the next 10 years. And pay a hefty fine. As well as the damages and back-pays.